I am going to revive this thread to show the first step in making an American pakset, city roads without lines. White dashed lines indicate something completely different on US roads, and typically within towns most streets do not have lines. Note, the yellow lined cross roads were manually added and crosswalks were not modified..

Intro year is 1915, which is when paved surface roads would have become increasingly common within the US..

[2] "The 1971 edition of the MUTCD included several significant standards; it required all center lines to be painted on roads in yellow (instead of white), and required that all highway guide signs (not just those on Interstate Highways) contain white text on a green background. Most of the repainting to the 1971 standard was done between 1971 and 1974, with a deadline of 1978 for the changeover of both the markings and signage." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_on_Uniform_Traffic_Control_Devices

I am aware of the line marking changes, however, those applied to intercity routes. Two lane intracity roads did not contain any markings. Arterial roads and 2+ lane roads are the only ones marked within cities, even today.

Ideally city roads should be broken into several different styles that can change over time. Until 1915 they should be simple cobblestone. From 1915 - 1927 simple paved surface with no markings. 1927 - 1954 stop lines should appear, and 1954- present is when crosswalks should be visible. For routes between cities, roads could also adhere to the timeline; 1915-1923 simple pavement, 1923-1971 single white line, and 1971-present double yellow line.

For the purposes of this pakset, roads would be the most defining feature of an era in US history. The reason being how reliant transportation has been on them since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line. Trains of course will be important as well, although the tracks themselves will not change much, which will make it more difficult to differentiate the era with.

Those roads should be rather large arterial roads, given the grid constant of 3 km (standard) or 750 m (experimental) in your picture.

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White dashed lines indicate something completely different on US roads

What is different with the lines in the US? (besides being yellow). I thought they mean the same as in the rest of the world, the middle of the road. They must not be crossed when they are solid lines.

What is different with the lines in the US? (besides being yellow). I thought they mean the same as in the rest of the world, the middle of the road. They must not be crossed when they are solid lines.

Broken white lines are only used on one way roads and highways. A dashed white line indicates both lanes are traveling in the same direction, and you can freely cross over the dashed lines. Solid white lines are a bit rare, usually only seen on freeways and the like to separate a HOV lane from the rest of other travel lanes. A single white line is also used on the edges of roads to separate the lane from the shoulder. Otherwise, a double yellow line is always used to separate lanes of opposite travel.

Of course these styles can vary across regions, I am only familiar with what I have seen in the Southeast.

What line is in the middle of a normal bidirectional road with one lane in each direction outside of built-up areas? The ones found between small towns or villages

Yellow stripes, typically with sections of double-solid, half-solid-half-dashed, or dashed, as conditions allow for passing (although some remain double-yellow for their entirety). Also, in nearly all cases, a single solid white stripe will be on the outside edge (whether there is a shoulder / breakdown lane or no)

Yellow always indicates oncoming traffic (if there is a painted median in the middle, it will always be yellow; if there is a painted median between lanes going in the same direction, it will be white) and white always indicates traffic going in the same direction.

The next project I was working on is designing a new series of rail waytypes to fit the timeline. I started with the most basic form of railway in the US - jointed light rail on wooden ties. Light rail is less than 100lbs. This would have been common on mainline railroads until 1950 when continuous weld and larger rail took over. Jointed rail is still used on branchlines, industry tracks, and sidings today.

Here is a sample;

This will replace the "low quality track" in game. The middle tracks are the original "low quality track" graphics slightly adjusted. The speed difference is minimal between the three styles, after all this is meant to be cheap and slow.

OK.. I have been working on roads this evening.. I laid out basically a three type network to last the entirety of the game. The first type is a basic rural road. These roads would connect smaller towns that were not connected by arterial highways or other major roads, or cross connect cities as alternate routes. From the beginning of the timeline to 1920, rural roads are going to be dirt.

These are accurate to what American road development would have looked like. The first stage is the 1920-1945 basic pavement. The white line would have trickled down to rural routes much slower, which is why they do not appear until 1945, lasting until a major standards change in 1971. In 1971 and for the rest of the game, we get the standard yellow double line without the white shoulder markings.

The next type of road is arterial highway, which is basically a major intercity road.

The years for the last two are still not final. The last road will probably appear between 1995 and 2005 with a higher speed limit than the previous road.

How about a high-speed road, with white dashed lines, and a high maintenance cost, (and ideally available as an elevated way) which can be used to build expressways starting around 1960? Two of these would look like a superhighway even if Simutrans does not yet fully have the concept of both lanes going in the same direction.

25mph - residential, often not signed (sometimes signed at 20mph or even 15mph)30mph, 35mph most common city streets (sometimes signed at 25mph)30mph-45mph - arterial roads45mph-55mph - major arterial roads55mph-70mph - rural highways55mph-80mph - freeways

How about a high-speed road, with white dashed lines, and a high maintenance cost, (and ideally available as an elevated way) which can be used to build expressways starting around 1960? Two of these would look like a superhighway even if Simutrans does not yet fully have the concept of both lanes going in the same direction.

That is the third type of road, available beginning in 1956.

For this one I just used the default autobahn and added diagonals like I did for all the other roads and improved the dashed centerline.. This version ends in 1975, after that point there will be shoulder markings like on the late arterial roads.

The speed limits thus far are below;

Rural Roads;

1912 - 1939 50 km/h1939 - 1971 60 km/h1971 - 2999 75 km/h

Arterial Roads;

1914 - 1924 60 km/h1924 - 1971 80 km/h1971 - 2999 95 km/h

Highways;

1956 - 1975 100km/h1975 - 2999 150km/h

Of course those are not set in stone, but I believe they are realistic and balanced.

This pretty much ends the roads portion of the pak from me.. There will be one more highway to share, but that is all in terms of new networks. The dirt and gravel roads need replacements, but for now I will just leave the standard pak128 versions in place. There will be a plain pavement available from the 70s onward to represent a driveway to access industries or attractions.

Let me know what you guys think.. If all is well I can upload the completed paks and source files.

i don't want to be overcritical, but on the diagonal part is a very visible zig zag pattern, due to not very well tile-able noise. Perhaps you can match the different tiles a bit better? The texture of the straight parts is pretty good however. It has not only noise, but also a slight stripy structure, orthogonal to the direction of the road. The structure is also very well tilable, no tile borders are noticeable at all.

Ontario's 400 series highways built during the 50's to current day are marked as 100km/h, but it's possible to do 130km/h safely. Actually, it's possible to do 160km/h on them in a car, but trucks still flip over occasionally on the on/off ramps.

18 wheeler trucks still only do 100km/h to keep fuel economy good and seem to lack power while going uphills. Not unusual to see 18 wheelers only doing 80km/h while climbing.

i don't want to be overcritical, but on the diagonal part is a very visible zig zag pattern, due to not very well tile-able noise. Perhaps you can match the different tiles a bit better? The texture of the straight parts is pretty good however. It has not only noise, but also a slight stripy structure, orthogonal to the direction of the road. The structure is also very well tilable, no tile borders are noticeable at all.

You are not being overcritical at all, in fact I welcome and appreciate you bringing that glitch to my attention. I did what I could to it, but I have trouble seeing on this computer screen so it may not be perfect..

I set the speed limit high for the modern highway because it is open ended until the end of the timeline. There probably will not be any vehicles that can reach 150 km/h operating speed anyway until the future. I also took into consideration the national speed limit, however, it did not make sense to me to cap all three of the available roads to the same speed limit when they differ widely in cost and maintenance.

In any case, I am satisfied with the network graphics thus far. We can adjust speed/cost, etc. later if necessary. The important thing for me now is to draw bridges for each and every network so we can get a functioning road network for this pakset.

Alright, the road networks have been finished. I attached a zip file containing all the completed roads and bridges. I suggest locating and removing the standard roads and bridges from the pak128 folder for the sake of simplicity. The best way is to copy them to the desktop to serve as a backup.

In total there are 9 new networks and 6 bridges. The bridges are just the simple road bridge textured for the new networks. These will need to be replaced/upgraded with new graphics later. In the game, these roads are available and balanced for the years 1912 - 2020. Prior to that the only road available is dirt with cobblestone in the cities.

To round out the set, a replacement dirt road would be most helpful, so would a better variety of timeline era specific bridges.. Any takers?

I tested these rather extensively so graphical glitches or incorrect dat parameters *should* be non-existent. However, if you do find a problem please let me know so I can correct the problem..

Prior to that [1912] the only road available is dirt with cobblestone in the cities.

Did you have macadam roads in the past in the US? They could be a good fill in inbetween, for slow speeds up to 40 km/h (don't know whats that in US trivial units). Since they could support rather hight weights, they could still be interesting for large bulk carriers (Like the huge mining dump truck in pak128).:wq

Did you have macadam roads in the past in the US? They could be a good fill in inbetween, for slow speeds up to 40 km/h (don't know whats that in US trivial units). Since they could support rather hight weights, they could still be interesting for large bulk carriers (Like the huge mining dump truck in pak128).:wq

There were macadam roads in the US from the 1830s onward. Still, they were very few in number.. I could rework the gravel road into a macadam..

In any case I was tired of looking at roads and railroad graphics so I decided to bring some of the awesome city "cars" from pak128.Britain and see how they fit in the period before the internal combustion engine. Suffice to say they look fantastic!

As a special treat, I took the covered wagon vehicle and combined it with the horse team and made it a city vehicle (see attached for sample) that will clog your streets from 1750 - 1890. A very special thanks to James Petts and James Hood for drawing the originals and making them open source.

Well It may be too late but I have been working on a road way also. It's not totally done yet, but I went in a different direction with mine. Not really certain which period it fits with but it has both dashed and straight lines (for corners). I suppose it would be more modern era, perhaps post 50's? I got into a little more detail with mine though and added road blocks on dead-end roads as well as stop signs at intersections. If you think it's something worthy of being included in 128 USA let me know and I can touch it up a little more. At any rate, this is my first road pak so it was a good learning experience.

I was thinking about taking the roads in a different direction by varying the widths of the roads. Typically the rural roads are more narrow and highways wider to accommodate higher speeds. This road was simply the standard width but I can try different sizes if there is interest.

I also have a question on one of the Dat attributes for roads. I notice there is a max_weight setting, is this respected by vehicles? Does this mean a vehicle finding a way will not travel on roads that have a maximum_weight less than the vehicles weight? if so that excites me very much as I know we have roads restricted by vehicle weight in my part of the country. I'm guessing the value is in Tons?

Well It may be too late but I have been working on a road way also. It's not totally done yet, but I went in a different direction with mine. Not really certain which period it fits with but it has both dashed and straight lines (for corners). I suppose it would be more modern era, perhaps post 50's? I got into a little more detail with mine though and added road blocks on dead-end roads as well as stop signs at intersections. If you think it's something worthy of being included in 128 USA let me know and I can touch it up a little more. At any rate, this is my first road pak so it was a good learning experience.

I was thinking about taking the roads in a different direction by varying the widths of the roads. Typically the rural roads are more narrow and highways wider to accommodate higher speeds. This road was simply the standard width but I can try different sizes if there is interest.

I also have a question on one of the Dat attributes for roads. I notice there is a max_weight setting, is this respected by vehicles? Does this mean a vehicle finding a way will not travel on roads that have a maximum_weight less than the vehicles weight? if so that excites me very much as I know we have roads restricted by vehicle weight in my part of the country. I'm guessing the value is in Tons?

If we are good on roads, I'll start playing with bridges.

Looking good so far! I particularly like the idea of putting details on the roads.. I wonder if it would be feasible to add simple telegraph wires to the early dirt roads and railroads? Or perhaps even street lights on cityroads..

As for the variable width roads.. One problem - vehicle alignment would need to be extremely close to the center to ensure they flow well over all road networks. A solution would be to vary road width by era, and have vehicles closer in the early years and wider in the late years, however, that seems like a lot of extra work.

Next, AFAIK, the weight figure is not yet implemented. I always set mine at 50 on roads, simply because that was the default in the road dat files I have seen..